Running A Software Business On 5 Hours A Week | Kalzumeus Software

Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software

Making 20% Time Work | begriffs.com

Following Google’s lead many companies have instituted “20% time” for their employees. This is one day per week in which employees can work on projects of their own choosing. The practice keeps developers motivated and sharp, produces tools to solve company problems, and in the best case creates open source which builds prestige and helps recruitment.

It’s actually open source software that's eating the world

At Lightspeed we’ve been investing aggressively in open source software (OSS) businesses for the past 10 years. Recently, we’ve seen a significant increase in entrepreneurs pitching open source startups, and we’ve also seen greater competition for these deals. We pulled together some numbers in an attempt to measure the acceleration in interest in and funding for OSS businesses in the last few years. The results were staggering even to us.

How I Went from Burn-out Entrepreneur to Automating my $4M Company and 10x my Productivity.

Building a business is hard enough. On its official website, the U.S. Small Business Administration purports that “roughly 50 percent of…

This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch - Twenty Sided

Last week I derided permacrunch – the policy of working an entire creative team 70 hours a week all the time – as “the policy of simpletons and sociopaths”. This led to some people asking, “Why is crunch even a thing?” Can’t management just plan the schedule so that the project is done on time using only 40 hour work weeks?

The secret life of a games programmer: I’ve lived my dream and it came up short | Anonymous

‘Passion’ meant working six days a week –16-hour days. I still play games, but having seen the inside of the sausage factory they’ll never be the same again

komoroske.com/office-hours

Less stress, more productivity: why working fewer hours is better for you and your employer

There’s always too much work to be done on software projects, too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix. Some days you’re just not going through the backlog fast enough, you’re not producing enough code, and it’s taking too long to fix a seemingly-impossible bug. And to make things worse you’re wasting time in pointless meetings instead of getting work done. Once it gets bad enough you can find yourself always scrambling, working overtime just to keep up. Pretty soon it’s just expected, and you need to be available to answer emails at all hours even when there are no emergencies. You’re tired and burnt out and there’s still just as much work as before. The real solution is not working even harder or even longer, but rather the complete opposite: working fewer hours.

The Stress of Remote Working | HackerNoon

In software engineering, remote working makes a lot of sense since, most of the time, you only need a computer and an internet connection to perform your duties. So there are fewer reasons to force people to sit in a predefined office everyday. Consequently, it has become an important feature of a lot of IT jobs, even in Belgium, while it is definitely not the most forward looking job market. That said, most of the time, the remote working offer only apply to a part of the week (1 or 2 days a week seems to be the most frequent proposition here). Nevertheless, it definitely is getting a hold in most companies.

Here’s a metric that I bet you aren’t using… I want you to check it out, and start using it. It could be a real wake up call about how inactive your users are. I’m talking about the XD28 metric. A… | Moe Ali | 17 comments

Here’s a metric that I bet you aren’t using… I want you to check it out, and start using it. It could be a real wake up call about how inactive your users are. I’m talking about the XD28 metric. A lot of teams have never bothered to collect this data - but you can get started after 28 days. Here’s how the metric works👇 This metric looks at a user and determines how many days they used your product/feature in a 28 day cycle. If your user used your product just once in the last 28 days, they’re identified as 1D28. If they use it 5 days out of 28, they’re categorized as 5D28 and so on… Then you create a bucket with each number of days and how many users used the product for each number of days. For example, 17 users belong in the 5D28 bucket and 500 users belong in the 24D28 bucket. You can use this to create a distribution chart. You should be using these figures to calculate the average AND median number of days that users are using the product in a given 28 day cycle. Ideally you want people to be moving from a lower number of days to a higher number. E.g. If your average number of XD28 is 5 days, you want to aim for 15 days in a year’s time. This is an interesting metric because often you will find users at one extreme of this distribution curve. And it can be a real wake up call for Product Managers. | 17 comments on LinkedIn

After automation: Software will work for you, not on you

Alex Komoroske, CEO and cofounder, Common Tools — AI promises “infinite software”—endless tools tailored to every need—but funneled through today's app stores, that abundance just means more silos, more trapped data, and more to orchestr...

Not all good products make good businesses - The Intercom Blog

It's easy to assume that solving a real problem with a good product magically creates a successful software business. Sadly that’s never guaranteed.

Five ways to build a $100 million business

Some time ago my friend (and co-investor in Clio , Jobber and Unbounce ) Boris Wertz wrote a great blog post about "the only 2 ways to bui...

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it